1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to authentication and more specifically to complex, deterministic authentication based on shared data and sorting algorithms with embedded computations.
2. Introduction
Authentication plays an important role in computer security and in restricted access to sensitive computing resources. Authentication is the process of verifying the credentials or permissions of an entity desiring access to a computing resource such as a file, folder, network resource, CPU time, etc. One common way to authenticate is to verify a username and a password, such as credentials on a local computer or to a remote server. Another common authentication approach relies on biometric authentication, such as speaker recognition, fingerprint scanning, or iris scanning. Other approaches include certificate authentication (a type of asymmetric cryptography) and challenge-response authentication.
An attacker can compromise an authentication scheme by detecting patterns in the signature to surmise and exploit the authentication process or by replaying sniffed traffic. Malicious persons use constantly improving technology to compromise authentication schemes, requiring authentication processes to efficiently produce signatures with unique, ever more complex, and ever more random approaches. Accordingly, what is needed in the art is an improved way to authenticate entities.